2026

Acrylic on dibond

200 x 300mm

Athenaeum depicts a moment in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan: before Raphael’s monumental cartoon for his famed School of Athens, silhouetted visitors discuss the scene before them, echoing the gestures and rapt discussions of the drawing’s own subjects.

In ancient Rome, the Athenaeum — meaning the ‘place of Athena’, much like Athens itself — was a school for the study of the arts. In contemporary Italian, the same word, as Ateneo, is a university, an art school or a school of music.

The School of Athens cartoon, dated 1508–1509, is an extreme rarity: a surviving full-scale preparatory drawing for a Renaissance fresco. Writings from the era refer to others of similar scale and prestige, now lost; one of these was Michelangelo’s 1505 cartoon for his never-finished fresco the Battle of Cascina, undertaken in direct competition with a concurrent work of Leonardo, also lost. Vasari’s Lives of the Artists speaks of Michelangelo’s cartoon as the ‘school’ of a generation of artists, as does the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini: ‘Nothing survives of ancient or of modern art which touches the same lofty point of excellence; and as I have already said, the design of the great Lionardo was itself most admirably beautiful. These two cartoons stood, one in the palace of the Medici, the other in the hall of the Pope. So long as they remained intact, they were the school of the world.’